Questions, questions

Most patients are satisfied with the service they get from the tax-funded health service. And people with recent experience of treatment tend to be a lot more impressed with the standard of care than those who rely for their information on badmouthing of the NHS in the press.

But a National Audit Office report this week found one in seven people using the NHS over the past three years were in some way dissatisfied with the experience. The vast majority did not make a formal complaint.

This may have been because the fault was trivial. But the NAO suggested that many did not bother pursuing a complaint, as the procedure is time-consuming, complex and ultimately futile.

Karen Taylor, the NAO's head of health studies, said: "The main reason people don't complain is that they don't think anything will be done as a result."

About a fifth of complainers are motivated by a desire to improve the service. They may achieve that effect at ward level, but the NAO said there is no mechanism for transmitting the lessons learned from mistakes in one hospital or GP surgery to the rest of the NHS's 1.3 million workforce.

It is high time the NHS responded to the high volume of complaints about its complaints service. As the charity Help the Aged pointed out: "Sometimes making a complaint can be as frustrating and upsetting as the original problem."

That does not mean complaining is a complete waste of time.

Research this year by the Healthcare Commission found 52% of complainants want nothing more than an apology or a better explanation of what went wrong. Only 18% looked for compensation or action against the staff responsible.

People wanting an apology have a good chance of getting one if they pursue the complaint, appealing to a higher authority if the local NHS trust is recalcitrant. That may be the only way to get closure on a distressing experience.John Carvel

Why do banks need to borrow from each other?

Banks do not have vaults stuffed with money that they can use for their immediate needs. They trade on fairly thin margins and are used to swapping funds between each other to meet their pressing requirements. This is the way the interconnected modern money markets work.

The rate banks charge each other for overnight and three-month lending is called Libor (London interbank offered rate). Usually this interest rate is a fraction over the rate set by the Bank of England.

But banks have now stopped trusting each other. They are worried that their rivals could go out of business at any time and have stopped lending. The market for short-term money has therefore dried up and Libor has shot up to record highs. This is the origin of the credit crisis - the plumbing of the money markets has seized up.

If banks do not lend to each other, it means they have to carry much larger quantities of cash and other liquid assets in order, for example, to fill up cash machines and pay for their daily requirements. The problem is, they have few of these available. That's why they are borrowing money from the Bank of England through its emergency lending scheme.Deborah Hargreaves

Should I read more foreign-language books?

By the time the Booker prize-winner is announced next week, people throughout the UK will be in a position to pontificate on the relative merits of Aravind Adiga and Sebastian Barry.

After Thursday's announcement of the Nobel prize for literature, I failed to find a single person who could explain why the Nobel jury awarded Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.

My first thought was that this was one of those shameful moments that reveal how insular British literary life is: Le Clézio is French and though some of his 30 or so books have been translated into English, none are in print in the UK.

My second thought was that you only have to look at the Booker shortlist to realise that we are more of an isthmus than an island: two of the contenders are Indian, one is Irish and one Australian, and the rest, a third, are British.

Admittedly this literary isthmus bears little resemblance to physical geography. It connects us to continents on the other side of the globe, while bypassing most of our neighbours. At the root of this intellectual topography is a colonial history which has imposed the English language on so much of the world that we no longer feel we have to learn other languages to make ourselves understood. If you don't speak French then you're certainly not going to read it.

But it's not as simple as that. There's a long tradition of translation that has brought "foreign" literature home to us. Only a fool would presume to talk about the 19th century novel without reference to Tolstoy and Zola, and your local bookshop is as likely to stock War and Peace as George Eliot's Middlemarch.

Yet only a tiny proportion of the novels published in the UK today are in translation, and that is our loss. I'm trying to catch up with a generation of Latin American novelists who has grown up in Gabriel García Márquez's shadow. Then there are all those Scandinavian crime writers. And thanks to the Nobel, I might now be able to get my hands on Le Clézio's oeuvre. Until then, I have no real idea of what I'm missing.Claire Armitstead